What the data reveals when you track the permission structure, not the price index
The standard story of post-pandemic inflation
is a version of chaos theory: “A butterfly fluttered in China, causing a cascade of market perturbations that resulted in uncontrollable price increases” When consumers are obviously skeptical, it changes to something like this: “supply chains broke, energy prices spiked, demand surged, prices followed. When conditions normalized, prices came down.” The story is tidy, technically defensible, and largely wrong about what actually happened.
The triggers were real but, what the accepted story gets wrong is the mechanism; the process by which individual pricing decisions spread across industries, categories, and countries far beyond what any trigger condition (the butterfly) could justify. That mechanism is not economic. It is behavioral. And once you know what to look for, it is visible in the data.
The analytical framework I apply to organizational behavior- tracking how individuals respond to crowd conditions, and how crowds are shaped by individual actors- turns out to work equally well on markets. What it reveals in the inflation data of 2021 through 2024 is not a story about supply and demand. It is a story about social sanctions.
“The question is not why prices went up. It is why they didn’t come back down when the conditions that justified the increase resolved.”
The asymmetry that standard economics cannot explain
Consider coffee. Arabica commodity prices roughly doubled between 2019 and 2022, driven by genuine supply disruptions including Brazilian drought and shipping cost increases. Retail prices followed. So far, standard economics but, while commodity prices pulled back significantly in 2023, retail prices did not. By early 2026, the average retail price of ground coffee in the United States had reached nearly $9.40 per pound, more than double the 2019 average, while the commodity price had deflated substantially.
Eggs show the same pattern more dramatically. Avian Influenza was real, and the loss of over 127 million egg-laying hens since 2022 was a genuine supply shock. Prices spiked accordingly but, dominated by the price of feed, production costs fell back in 2023 and 2024. Retail prices remained high. The largest US egg producer reported a 247% increase in quarterly net income in early 2025, triggering an investigation by the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division.
Shrinkflation tells the same story in a different register. Rather than raising sticker prices, manufacturers reduced package sizes, effectively raising per-unit prices invisibly. A US Government Accountability Office analysis found that per-unit price increases from package downsizing alone ranged from 12% for paper towels to 32% for coffee between 2021 and 2023. This downsizing was heavily concentrated in the period of peak inflation narrative, slowing as that narrative faded, while traditional price increases continued.
The sanction structure
The connection here is not coordination. It’s not a conspiracy. The coffee roasters, egg producers, and cereal manufacturers were not calling each other. What they shared was a permission structure, a social and narrative environment in which raising prices, shrinking packages, and expanding margins had become not only acceptable but expected.
Sanction structures in markets work the same way they work in organizations. One visible actor moves. The consequences are acceptable; consumers complain but keep buying, competitors match rather than hold, regulators investigate slowly. The fog of diffused responsibility lifts for everyone simultaneously. And in that fog, rational actors make individually defensible decisions that produce collectively predatory outcomes. Nobody needed to coordinate. The sanction did the work.
“Nobody needed to coordinate. The sanction did the work. And someone built the sanction.”
Who built the sanction
This is where the analysis becomes uncomfortable for Canadians.
Television news advertising revenue in North America has collapsed structurally over the past decade, declining more than 50% in inflation-adjusted terms between 2014 and 2024. The advertisers who remain on regular television are disproportionately large consumer goods companies: the manufacturers of coffee, cereal, paper towels, household products. They are the companies whose pricing behavior those same networks were covering as an inflation story.
In Canada, the situation is compounded significantly. A disproportionate share of digital advertising revenue flows to foreign platforms; Google, Meta, and their peers, leaving Canadian news organizations even more financially dependent on the large domestic and multinational advertisers who remain. A news organization operating on contracting revenue is not a neutral observer of its main clients. It is an actor with a financial dependency and therefore a structural incentive, not necessarily conscious, to frame corporate pricing behavior as the inevitable consequence of external forces rather than a series of individual decisions made by people.
The inflation narrative; supply chains, COVID, Russia, avian flu, accomplished exactly that framing. It attributed individual pricing decisions to aggregate forces. It made the permission structure invisible by replacing it with a macro story that nobody could be held accountable for. And news organizations, navigating their own precarious financial position, had every reason to maintain that framing and none to challenge it.
What the data actually shows
When you track commodity costs against retail prices across multiple categories, map the timing of price increases against the inflation narrative in broadcast media, and apply a behavioral framework to the sequencing of individual corporate decisions, a different picture emerges. The trigger conditions were real but bounded. The price increases were real but unbounded. The gap between what costs justified and what prices delivered is not noise. It is signal — consistent enough across categories, geographies, and corporate structures to indicate a shared behavioral mechanism rather than independent economic responses.
That mechanism is crowd contagion operating through a sanction that was actively constructed and passively maintained. The construction was not conspiratorial. The maintenance was not coordinated. It was simply a narrative that was commodified by a service; No different than Superbowl commercials. The outcome, however; sustained margin expansion well beyond what trigger conditions justified, was therefore normalized- actively sold to viewers- by a media ecosystem financially dependent on the actors doing the expanding. The relationship is visible, measurable, and consequential.
For Canadian businesses and consumers, the implication is specific: The sanction structure was not local. It was imported, amplified by domestic medias increasingly desperate competition with foreign media platforms, and applied to a market where the analytical tools to identify it have not yet been widely deployed.
Consider those tools deployed.
This article draws on a proprietary behavioral analysis framework developed through APEX Deployment’s organizational and market research practice. Underlying data sources include US Bureau of Labor Statistics, USDA Egg Industry Center, US Government Accountability Office, WARC Media, and GroupM annual forecasts.
Hugh McGillivray · APEX Deployment Business Solutions
BA Psychology (Hons) · Organizational & Market Behavioral Analyst · apexdeployment.com